Warfare & Tactics

Super Sunday Titan Kill

This Battle Report relates to the Cascade Associate’s Titan loss on the 5th February 2012 - http://tuskers.killmail.org/?a=kill_...ll_id=12349996

Background

So, about two weeks ago Michael Harari, an associate of mine from Molden Heath and member of the TeamLiquid alliance informed that one of his corpmates had spotted an Avatar and an Ragnarok running Sanctums in two adjacent systems in Querious in a dead-end pipe, with the pipe entrance bubbled & the systems cyno-jammed.

His corpmate had left a Covert Ops in system with both of them for almost a week on end, just observing. After a while, the Titan pilots openly mocked him for how he couldn’t stop them ratting. However, TeamLiquid don’t have the resources in order to take down Titans so he contacted me.

Who am I? A Director of The Tuskers, a low sec piracy corporation who are “friendly” with Shadow Cartel (not blue!), a low sec piracy alliance based a few jumps away from us. Whilst we Tuskers do not have the resources to kill a Titan before his reinforcements could arrive, Shadow Cartel did. So, I reached out to them through one of their alliance executors. He seemed interested and sent a covert ops scout there.

The original idea was to wait until a wormhole opened in the target system to a system near where we are located (Gallente low sec) spawned and then send through Dictors to get tackle, with the rest of us coming down the pipe with gank fit ships, probably the new Tier 3 Battlecruisers which can pack 1000+ DPS and are quick, thus good for burning through bubbles.

Well, the Titans kept ratting without change whilst we were waiting, until the night beforehand..

The Shadow Cartel executor reached out to me and said the cyno jammer in the system the Avatar was ratting in was found to be offline so we could bring in our own capitals and a new plan was made. So, we set an OP the following day at 17:00 as the Titan pilot logged on roughly around that time.

On the day
He logged on before the designated time, so we Tuskers had to decide how we were going to get there – whilst Shadow were bringing in capitals, we would bring subcaps for support and due to our lower average SP. We eventually decided we would use our own carrier to deliver black ops ships to the nearby low sec, stage from there and chain black ops jumps until we get to within 1 black ops jump from the Avatar.

We gave our Bombers to our Carrier pilot and then shuttled down to our staging system of Gehi – an 34j journey from Hevrice, with most of the jumps going through high sec, a nerve wracking experience when you’re an outlaw!

So, we form up and Shadow’s bomber pilots join us and we announce the SEKRET plan…

Covert Plan

We have no titan within bridge range of that system so there’s no chance we can bridge a Dictor or HIC directly onto the Titan. Therefore, we have to work out how to tackle him, this is what we came up with:

1) Chain black ops jumps until our subcaps are set up 1 black ops jump away from Titan without being spotted
2) Get capitals set up 1 dread jump away from Titan without being spotted
3) Get the covert ops alt to light a cyno next to the Titan
4) Jump in Carriers with HICs inside their ship maintenance arrays whilst at the same time bridging in subcap support with the Black Ops bridge
5) Get Carriers to eject HICs
6) Get appropriate stealth bomber pilots to board HICs and bubble up!

So, we follow the plan, with a few difficulties – people being slow, Blockade Runner bringing wrong type of fuel, using more fuel than we thought. In the end we had to revise the Black Ops route we were using to get within Black Ops range of the system the Titan was in due to the need not to be spotted.

So, we finally arrive at step 3 after an hour of getting into position! The titan pilot is stationary as the cyno is up, we bridge in and spam board ship onto the HICs whilst waiting out session change timer and just as the Titan gets up to about .20 of max speed, I manage to swap from my Anathema to to a Devoter and get the bubble up.

After that, he logs off. I swap back to the Anathema after someone else confirms they got a bubble up and start to spam ship scanner on him whilst taking screenshots..

Our scout races to make it but it takes a while due to the ingates being bubbled to hell as the Titan melts in no time at all to our 7 Dreadnoughts + subcaps. Pod turns out to have "only" +5s in it, explains why he melted so fast, even considered his fit. We extract out safely just as one of his alliance mates logs in inside the system and smacks to the alt that lit the cyno next to the Titan about how all they do is rat and the scout can’t stop them. Alt links him the mail and he grows quiet.

TeamLiquid Tengu's POV Video (unedited):
http://goo.gl/I6tR9

Shadow Cartel Bomber/HIC POV:
http://vimeo.com/36251790

Shoutouts:

Gorski Car from TeamLiquid for scouting him out
Michael Harari from TeamLiquid for contacting me regarding the Titan
Hearnie from Shadow Cartel for setting up the Logistics and getting the cyno alt into system
Asakura Manji from Shadow Cartel for FCing the capital side of the fight
Beh3moth, the corpmate who was bridging us around in the Black Ops
Tsubutai, the corpmate who was the fuel *****
CCP for reducing session change timer from 30 seconds to 15 seconds.
And big up for Tawa Suyo, my <10M SP corpmate who spent 2 hours buzzing around in his Stiletto to allow us to sneak into Black Ops range without getting spotted in local intel channels, who unfortunately didn’t manage to get on the mail due to the bubbles he encountered

Everyone else who was involved and who brought DPS – much appreciated!

Nice. How long did that take?

Nice job and good to see low sec guys ganking null sec bears. Also nice BR but should of cross posted it here so this thread doesn't get locked for no content.

Added the BR to the OP.